


Two Sides of a Coin

by BlueLightningAndNexus



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: I mention Inception because that movie is absolutely awesome, Jake is bi and honestly it's not noticeable but take my word for it, Mentions of Charles, Mentions of Holt - Freeform, Mentions of Terry, Rosa had a higher voice in early seasons, Slight AU with regards to Rosa and Gina's relationship with others and each other, The 99 is basically a family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:07:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23208259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueLightningAndNexus/pseuds/BlueLightningAndNexus
Summary: Two one-shots, focusing on Jake's time in prison thinking about Amy; and Rosa's time in prison thinking about Gina. Set between seasons 4 and 5.This is set in an AU where Rosa is into Gina, and her relationship with Adrian is rocky at best, because let’s be honest, they were never a particularly solid couple; and Gina and Milton are kind of shaky, because for real, he hasn’t been in the show at all ever since that one episode. I know it’s not realistic for the Gina/Milton and Rosa/Adrian relationships to be as shaky as they are/were in this time in the B99 canon, so this is an AU.
Relationships: Jake Peralta/Amy Santiago, Rosa Diaz/Gina Linetti
Comments: 1
Kudos: 27





	1. Jake's Side: Heads

The days were the worst for Jake. 

All throughout the day, Jake had to do work for Warden Whatever-His-Last-Name-Was, investigating Romero and trying to find every bit of “Blitz” (read: meth) throughout the prison. Trying to give the Warden enough information to keep him from ratting Jake out was one thing, but the fact that he had to stay on Romero’s good side as well was exhausting. Ever since he got busted for dealing “street soups” (read: ramen), Jake was finding it harder and harder to think of creative ways to keep Romero from publicly castrating him. (Also, what was that about? What kind of sick, twisted man would find it such a crime to give ramen to prison inmates? Sure, Romero was a known murderer and notorious drug dealer who did some bad things in the past, but it’s not like he was trying to smuggle Blitz (read: meth) in through the ram—oh my god that would’ve been a great idea.)

At night, everything started to get quiet and he could fall asleep. Contrary to every horror movie ever, Caleb the Cannibal was actually quite the easy-going lightweight guy, and past a certain point in the evening, it took barely anything for him to exhaust himself. Even the walk to their cells from the library was enough to wear him out, and he slept like a rock for the entire night. Granted, Jake was pretty terrified of closing his eyes at all around Caleb the Cannibal (because of, you know, the reason he was in jail in the first place) for the first week he was in prison, but after day three of no sleep, he passed out in his bed. When he woke up the next morning with no missing body parts, he figured Caleb probably wasn’t going to eat him. 

During the day, he had no electronics (except for the phone he smuggled in here, but don’t tell the warden about that ssssshhhhhh), no friends, nobody to talk to (Caleb doesn’t count on account of being a cannibal), NOTHING! 

While he was working for Romero and the warden, he had nothing but time and his own thoughts to keep him company. And solitary confinement? Even worse, he had more time than he needed and more of his own thoughts than he was comfortable with. *Shudder*

Jake never dealt well with being alone. He pondered this during hour 54 of his solitary confinement. (Note: it was only hour 13, Jake just sucks at mental math and he didn’t have a watch). He questioned if this was the reason why he had stayed friends with Gina for so long, so he would always have a friend no matter what; but he immediately slapped himself for questioning the authenticity of a friendship between two childhood pals who were literally raised together. 

Trying to make use of his brilliant (read: frazzled and semi-scrambled) memory and copious amounts of free time, Jake spent most of said free time trying to reenact Disney movies from heart. Unfortunately, he had no props and could only do, like, three unique voices that didn’t hurt his throat, so a lot of the scenes felt quite dry and bland. Nonetheless, besides his own entertainment, reenacting the scenes had another use for Jake: it served as a measurement of time for how long he had been in solitary confinement. 

Buuuuuut the system wasn’t perfect. Jake found that he didn’t actually know how long the original Lion King movie was, and he often added in or extended scenes he found interesting, occasionally trying to balance this out by shortening or removing scenes that displeased him. (In one particular rundown of the beloved film he removed Mufasa’s death scene because he was already extremely dehydrated and couldn’t afford to cry). The system was especially flawed when Jake realized he didn’t even know what time it was when he originally entered confinement. At that point, he just gave up.  
Deciding that it would be a bad idea for his sanity to continue reciting the extremely emotional movie that only reminded him of his own father (read: Holt), Jake decided to resign himself to another coping mechanism entirely: thinking of Amy. 

Specifics didn’t matter. Sometimes he recalled their last conversation during her previous visit. Other times he tried making a top 10 list of their best moments as a couple; but he concluded that the judge of said system (himself) was too biased to make any good calls, a conclusion he reached when he fell asleep mid-list, woke up, and added “The First Kiss” to three of the top 5 positions.  
At one point, he tried to recall their last conversation before he left prison, but found the thought depressed him almost as much as thinking of Mufasa’s death when he suddenly realized his only real conversation with her right before they left was him hysterically sobbing and her hugging him tighter than humanly possible. He quickly did with that recollection what he did with a number of memories with his father (read: the real one): repressed the hell out of it, and never thought of it again, ever. 

When he was finally released from solitary confinement, he could have nearly cried. Actually, if we are being specific, he did cry. A lot. It made everybody involved really uncomfortable. He also tried hugging the warden, but found that got him tased and another 8 hours of confinement. Luckily he fell asleep for most of that second session. Still kind of a dick move, but whatever, #SaltyNotSalty.  
Speaking of falling asleep, Jake made an interesting discovery during his time in the prison. He found that the dream world was an escape from his current world. Suddenly plunging into his own dreams as much as possible, Jake felt like a more depressed yet wholesome Freddy Kruger, trying to figure out how to lucid dream. 

It was a concept he heard about from Charles one day. When he awoke after that tasing session, the conversation felt clear in his mind. 

__________________________

He was younger, generally more depressed, and he hadn’t been dating Amy yet. It was 2012, roughly five years ago. Charles hadn’t met Genevive. Holt wasn’t their captain. Terry was still shaken after the “Incident”, which was really him just shooting a mannequin five times than crying about it for as many hours. Amy still annoyed the hell out of him. He still annoyed the hell out of Amy. It was a whole thing. 

“God, I had the weirdest dream last night.”

Jake had barely dodged a hangover, his alcohol consumption the night before walking the fine line between “Having a good time with friends” and “Playfully self-loathing”, but he still got some pretty horrible sleep last night. Amy observed a particularly visible dependence on coffee this morning and his red eyes, but she was also still convinced that Jake was a dick at this point in their relationship, so she tried really hard to pretend she didn’t care (she did, but secretly). 

“What was it?”

Charles’ voice felt like a relief to Jake, a breath of fresh air, as soothing yet exciting as the coffee he was handing his pal. Whether this was an emotion felt at the time and a direct consequence of being near coffee, or whether this was a result of Jake’s current loneliness bleeding into the past Assassins Creed-style, he couldn’t say. 

“I…couldn’t even tell you. I think Bruce Willis was…well, either my father or my boyfriend.”

“You couldn’t tell?”

Rosa’s high-pitched honeyed tone at the time was a cold slap of water in the face (wait that’s not the saying), suddenly helping to wake Peralta up and jolt him into better-coordinated action with caffeine. Wait, no, that’s the coffee. Nevermind. 

“Well, I’m sorry Rosa, but the dream had very…ambiguous dialogue.” 

“That doesn’t make much sense,” she replied, slipping her dark leather jacket off her tanned shoulders and grabbing a glass of water from the nearby sink. 

“Of course it does!” Charles yelled out at Rosa, childish infatuation spilling out of his words a bit. (Okay, maybe it wasn’t, but Jake’s poetic tendencies were bleeding into the past, again, in Assassins Creed-style). “In a dream, everything feels super weird, like you’re underwater.”

“Ok, well, that’s a terrible example,” Rosa said, taking a sip from her own water, “seeing as sound travels faster underwater.”

“You know what we mean!” Jake replied, the volume and energy of his tone a direct result of the caffeine flowing through his system. 

“Actually, I have no idea. I’ve never dreamt.”

Normally, a statement like this would garner next to no reaction in the present day when everybody was used to Rosa’s detached, mechanical, barely-human nature. But then again, this wasn’t the present day. 

“WHAT!” Charles yelled, his loudness jolting even Jake while Rosa was utterly unfazed. She gave him a half-hearted uncaring shrug. “Yeah, never dreamt about anything. At the very least, I can’t remember them.”

“Makes sense,” Amy piped up from behind the trio, pouring herself a cup of coffee into a “World’s #1 Dad” mug she stole from Terry, “studies say we forget as much as 95% of our dreams.”  
“Nerd,” Jake replied without hesitation. 

“Actually, Jake, that is pretty interesting,” Charles explained. 

“Thank you, Boyle,” Amy brightly spoke through a small, genuine grin. “But Rosa, it’s still highly unlikely that you’ve never dreamt before. We all dream as children. Statistically, you not dreaming is almost impossible unless you have some kind of undiagnosed mental disorder.”

The words hung in the air for a few seconds, the duo-turned-trio-turned-quartet of detectives lingering on the connotations of the statement. 

“That would make…so much sense,” Jake finally spoke. 

“Shut up Peralta,” Rosa instantly retorted. 

“Yes ma’am.”

Quickly shifting the conversation out of what Jake could only assume (or hope) was an attempt to avoid the inherent awkwardness that came with discussing almost any facet of Young Rosa’s life, Boyle returned to the original idea. 

“Ya know Jakie, I actually read the most interesting article on the science behind dreaming.”

“Ugh, Boyle, it’s too early for science,” Jake muttered, forcing himself out of the wooden stool in the kitchen and over to the comfy, rolling chair next to his desk.

“Um, excuse you, Peralta, but it’s never too late for science,” Amy’s irritation-yet-sexy voice replied from a few feet away. 

Jake didn’t want to come up with a comeback, choosing to let Amy have this tiny victory. Boyle continued. 

“It was about something called “lucid dreaming”. Apparently, it’s when people have certain cues or skills that let them realize when they are dreaming. Have you ever realized that?”

Jake nodded his head no, deciding that it would be best to avoid telling Charles and Amy about that time he realized he was dreaming and mentally substituted Idris Elba’s face for his father. Another conversation for another day (read: therapy session). 

“I’ve had that happen a couple of times,” Amy spoke as she organized her desk and cracked open a fresh case file. “When you realize you’re dreaming you can do whatever you want, like laminate stuff, or staple papers together.”

“God, that’s the lamest use of reality manipulation I’ve heard in my life,” Jake disgustedly retorted, before turning back to Boyle. “But how do I realize I’m dreaming? Oh my god is this like Inception?!”  
Charles nodded, a bright smile plastered across his face. “Yep. Some people do things like wear watches, because when they dream, they won’t be wearing a watch, and they’ll realize that they’re dreaming.”

“Well, that’s a stupid idea,” Jake replied as he leaned back into his chair, appalled and defeated at the very idea of doing something so menial as wearing a watch. 

“It’s not all that you can do. Remember how Ellen Page’s boyfriend had that red dice as his totem?”

“The character’s name is Arthur and the actor is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but yes, continue.”

“Well, some people have things like that. It doesn’t have to be big or fancy or complicated, just some new habit that you adopt.”

____________________________

Jake tried to make his own totem, but he found that the supplies he had access to were quite limited. He tried making a bracelet totem out of some napkins he folded up in lunch, but one of the guards tried to tase him on account of thinking the napkins were weapons. Or, at least he assumed that was the reason. Honestly, the whole situation seemed like a very flimsy excuse for some good-ol-fashioned brutality. 

He later tried using a plastic fork as a totem. Amazingly, that didn’t get any red flags from these trigger-happy guards, but then he dropped it after about 19 seconds and concluded that he needed something that he wouldn’t need to hold onto. 

Jake briefly contemplated using blitz as a totem, but realized that 1) that is a terrible idea, and 2) that’s just plain not original. 

Finally, he realized something crucial: the totem didn’t need to be a physical object, just something new in his physical appearance he would routinely check. Jake longed for the night every single godforsaken day. During the day, he was plagued by the depressing nature of his situation, and sure, he could talk to her in secret on his phone; but at night, in his dreams, he would see Amy in person. He would be able to hold her, kiss her, hug her. 

It was perfect. 

In the day, his wrists had small scarlet lines from the handcuffs placed on him after his arrest, and his forearms and shoulder ached with bruises that came from encounters-gone-south with the guards. These were his totems, not some random stuff he found in the cafeteria. During his time in the dream world, he would find his skin completely clear, and he suddenly realized how all teenagers must feel. 

This was how he knew he was dreaming, and this was how he saw Amy. 

It was depressing, but he at least hoped Rosa was doing better.


	2. Rosa's Side: Tails

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Focuses instead on Rosa and Gina. Honestly still disappointed they didn't end up together.

The nights were the worst for Rosa.

In the day, she kept busy. She tried to uphold a reputation of being tough-as-nails, unapproachable and utterly intimidating. Being a (former) cop would have normally been a disservice to this task and made her an easy target, but Rosa, ever resourceful and endlessly itching for a fight, instead used her frequent encounters with other inmates trying to shank her as an example to everyone else in the prison. Fights were a routine occurrence in any jail, especially a densely crowded New York prison of average security that was constantly boiling over with irritable guards, inter-gang conflict and smuggling operations. Therefore, under normal circumstances, some new woman throwing a couple of punches at her fellow jail occupants wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows.  
But what did raise a couple of eyebrows? Rosa Diaz, a 34-year old former cop arriving after being arrested (by legendary the Lieutenant Melanie Hawkins no less) for robbing several million dollars from multiple banks in the region. What else raised several eyebrows? Rosa Diaz, in a prison where she had many enemies, actively seeking out and beating those enemies into submission in her first week and a half before they could do the same to her.

So yeah, Rosa was a badass.

For the rest of any given day, she mostly kept to her own business. Rosa made a few “friends”, who were really just people that didn’t try to stab her and vice-versa (the bar for prison acquaintanceship is utterly, excruciatingly low). She also made a few new “enemies”, who were really just anyone that did try to stab her, which, statistically speaking, was about 70-80% of the prison. Prison might have been very cutthroat, but at least the social divisions were pretty simple.

Nonetheless, Rosa persisted, finding that the experience of living in prison actually wasn’t too different from public school, albeit with less funding.

But at night, everything was awful. Well, more so than in the day. She couldn’t wander around, she was locked in her cell for the night. She had nothing to keep her busy, and her stupid roommate was one of her “friends”, so without an opponent to engage in combat with, she had nothing to do. Granted, this wasn’t the normal complaints that most people had, but whatever, this was prison, anything goes.  
Everyone was asleep, but Rosa couldn’t sleep. This wasn’t out of anything wrong with her current sleeping conditions (well, they could’ve been better, but whatever); relatively speaking, they were about as good as sleeping on the floor, which Rosa did all the time.

And yet, in the silence that came with the night, and with nothing to keep her mind and body occupied, Rosa’s fight-or-flight response switched off, and her mind turned to the one thing that kept haunting her.

Gina Linetti.

That stupid, pretty, charming, stupid, funny, stupid woman of her dreams.

And that was exactly what was happening now.  
____________________________________________

“Alright ladies, get in. Lights out in two.”

Rosa silently, slowly obeyed the female guard’s orders. She had no reason not to; some of the other prisoners in here were so suicidal that they seemed to intentionally disregard and disobey everything that the prison guards said, even something as simple as going to bed.

Oscar Diaz tended to ingrain many life lessons he learned in his own youth into the development of his beloved daughter, Rosa. One of these lessons was that there is no use in standing up to somebody stronger than you; Rosa learned this early on in life, and she used it as fuel to become stronger than everyone around her. She had never been scared to get in a fight, never scared to compete with her classmates in school (whether it be ballet, piloting or business school), never scared to face somebody bigger than her, and never scared to stand up to a superior.

But this wasn’t like normal life. If Rosa didn’t do what the guards did, she would be beat and tased and put in solitary confinement, and while that would normally be a blessing in disguise, she didn’t want to be alone with only her thoughts at the moment; the very idea scared her, and Rosa never scared.

Her cellmate was already in the top bunk, partially asleep. She rolled over slightly to give Rosa a glance through her half-open eye, then reverted to the original position and resumed attempts at getting some much needed shut-eye.

In a reoccurring theme, Rosa was dissatisfied with the sort of quiet and calm that would have normally appeased her outside prison life. Even her cellmate (whose name she admittedly didn’t know and didn’t want to know) had forsaken the former cop, leaving her to yet another night of solitude, concentration and self-loathing. She lazily crawled into the piss-poor excuse for a bed, trying to ignore the amalgamated putrid smell of both her roommate’s godawful foot odor and the porcelain throne in the corner of her room.

Settling for throwing her arm at an angle over her face, covering her eyes and nose, Rosa tried to let consciousness slip past her.

Nope.

Rosa’s wandering mind betrayed the bags under her eyes and the worsening lethargic movements that represented her overwhelming exhaustion. She needed something, anything to do that would help her fall asleep. She never had issues with falling asleep, but she tried to remember some of the tricks that Amy taught her back during the early days at the 99. Something about counting sheep, staying completely still, whatever.

None of it was working anyways.

Resigning to her fate, Rosa’s thoughts turned to the object of her affections, and my god did she hate it.

None of this feels right. I’m with Adrian right now. I should be happy with him. I should be dying to get out of here and make out with his handsome face and shag him until he can barely breathe.  
She tried readjusting the placement of her body on the hard bed, hoping it would somehow purge the anxieties and guilt and self-loathing from her mind. She wished she said or did something to Adrian before Hawkins got to her, or said something to Gina, but she didn’t, and now she hated herself for it.

Fuck, I wish I told her, she thought to herself. 

Emotions were never Rosa’s forte, but she was able to manage them when she needed to. Her neighbors still thought she was an absolute chatterbox, and she was able to turn off her cold, silent exterior in her relationships with Marcus and Adria. But this…this was something else entirely.

Rosa didn’t know how to deal with a situation like this. She didn’t want to be into another person while dating Adria, but if she was being honest, she and Adrian hadn’t been super stable for a while, and quite frankly, she and Gina wouldn’t be good for each other. For fuck’s sake, Gina didn’t even know she was bi. (Actually, she might; that woman has eyes and ears on everything.)

Fuck, I hope she knows.

With a satisfying crack, the lights turned off across the prison. Rosa barely noticed.

This still doesn’t change the fact that I can’t just break up with Adrian because I’m in love with another woman. That doesn’t make sense. I’m not that kind of person, and he doesn’t deserve that.  
Her mind falls back to all the time that she and Gina spent together. Rosa barely recognized it in herself, but a small part of her subconscious feared that she would never see that woman again, and that she would never have the chance to speak her true feelings. Actually…

Does she already know? She couldn’t right?? How would she know? I never tell her anything about myself. I don’t even know if she likes women. Nothing about this makes sense. And this still doesn’t address the Adrian situation.

She spent the rest of the night running through some of the possibilities that could or would go wrong. After a few minutes like this, she decided to remember the elephant in the room: Gina’s boyfriend…whatever his name was. Martin? Marvin? It was Marvin. She thought.

Marvin seems about right, she decided, before moving on.

It was the most obvious part of why a relationship between them wouldn’t work, but Rosa refused to address it, which only made her feel terrible. She would never be a fucking homewrecker, especially when she is in a relationship and especially not for the family of one of her best friends.

Or…maybe her #1 best friend, period. She actually didn’t know where Gina would rank on that list. After spending about three seconds thinking about it, she realized there wasn’t much of a list; Gina was genuinely her only real friend. Actually, depending on who you ask and what your interpretation of friend is, that might not even be an accurate conclusion due to the omission of the rest of the 99.  
Jake, Amy, Holt, Terry, Charles…they’re all like a family to me. But Gina is my only actual friend.

Again, this sparked an entire mental conversation with herself. Did Jake really count as a friend? Was Amy a friend? They better be, same for Charles.

Perhaps it’s not a matter of who among the 99th Precinct of Brooklyn is in the arbitrary category of “Found Family” and who is in the equally arbitrary category of “Friend”; maybe it’s just about who Rosa has feelings for, and at the moment, that’s Gina.

Shortly after reaching that conclusion, exhaustion finally took Rosa, and she passed out.

______________________________________________

Rosa would never admit it, but when one of the guards told her she had a visitor during breakfast the next morning, she felt so excited her heart nearly leaped out of her chest and strangled itself.  
She practically sprinted to the visitor’s room. Everyone else there had been waiting for husbands, wives, children, friends and parents for hours; some had fallen asleep slumped against the walls, others were patiently and unblinkingly staring at the small electronic clock in the wall, while others still had taken seats next to the door, hoping their special person was up next.

These people had settled into a sort of routine, and Rosa noticed; every day at the crack of dawn, they would all move down to this cramped room in a zombie-like state, sometimes forsaking breakfast in the hopes it would bring them to their special person faster. It wasn’t often that somebody came in this late in the day (relatively speaking: it was barely 8:30).

When one of the guards told Rosa to stop running, for once in her life, she made the conscious decision to respect this order from an authority figure and/or security personnel. She was not jeopardizing this chance, and she obeyed, albeit while giving a dramatic sigh and continuing to walk faster than she normally would.

Rosa’s internal clock had been consistent and flawless ever since her arrival in prison. She made sure to know what day of the week it was and what the current date was at all times. It was the only way to keep sane when the time she spent in this prison stretched out, but it also provided an easy, obvious way to keep track of visits with her friends.

Amy and Charles came very Tuesday, right after visiting Jake. Every Saturday, either Terry or Holt came down, depending on Sarge and Sharon’s schedules for the day. Oftentimes the purpose for her superior officers’ visits were both to check up on Rosa and provide info pertaining to Melanie Hawkins (the bitch). Sometimes, Kevin would call the prison four or five days in advance and arrange an extra visit on Holt’s behalf, usually if something was keeping the squad busy. One time, Hitchcock even came, but only to meet up with some 20-year old girlfriend of his; honestly, Rosa was just relieved he didn’t come to visit her.

Today was Thursday. Nobody had anything scheduled, and Kevin never called in advance this week. Something was up.

As her walking pace increased to the maximum possible speed she could go without getting tased by the guards, her mind ran through a possible list of visitors: her mother, her father, Amy, Charles. She refused to let herself believe it was Adrian, because he’s still legally dead, or Jake, because that would mean that they got out of prison and she’s still in this shithole.

Her train of thought turned frantic: Please, please, God, just let it be Mom or Dad, just let it be someone, just let i—

Rosa arrived at the door.

And so did Gina.

Rosa looked over at her friend through the metal-and-glass slab built into the wall that functioned as a door. Eyes wide with shock and surprise, her heart racing faster than an Indy 500 vehicle, Rosa eagerly watched the shorter woman as the door made a loud, clicking “thunk” and slid open.

“Hey Ro-Ro, long tim—“

Rosa cut Gina off by sprinting past the tiny gap between the door and the wall, literally sweeping Gina off her feet in a running-hug and lifting her an inch into the air as she tightened the embrace to almost suffocating levels.

“R-Rosa, please…”

Instantly embarrassed at both doing the unthinkable (expressing affection) and nearly choking out her friend, Rosa suddenly threw both arms off her friend’s back, letting the disoriented and oxygen-deprived Gina collapse haplessly and abruptly to the ground.

“Sorry,” Rosa awkwardly, quickly spat out, her arms mechanically folding over her chest as she tried to revive her posture as stone-cold badass. Gina let out a light, wheezy chuckle.

“Jesus, Diaz, I knew you were always a softie but—“

Gina was suddenly pulled into another, equally abrupt yet less intense hug, this time for an entirely different purpose:  
“Gina, I’m doing this to shut you up.”

Slightly taken aback but content with the fact that Rosa choose not to lift her off the ground or cut off her airway, Gina fell into the hug, her perfectly-painted-and-manicured nails wrapping around the locks of Rosa’s greasy midnight hair as she eased into the foreign gesture of affection.

Nuzzling her head into Rosa’s shoulder, Gina fell into a state of euphoria.

“I missed you too, Ro-Ro.”


End file.
